Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (104 page)

An FBI probe in the late 1970s resulted in 117 convictions of ILA officials, businessmen, and several Genovese and Gambino soldiers for extortion and corruption in East Coast harbors. The intermittent pressure, however, failed to dislodge the Genovese hold on Local 1804-1 and on METRO at Port Newark and Elizabeth. Evaluating the Genovese successes in the harbor, Robert Buccino, the deputy chief of the New Jersey attorney general’s organized crime division, considered Gigante’s gang a frustrating opponent. “We’ve attempted to infiltrate them over the years and always struck out,” Buccino commented in 1989, conceding that the Genoveses were the most powerful crime family in the state.

At their 1988 Commission meeting, Chin Gigante disparaged John Gotti’s delight in his son’s initiation into a Cosa Nostra life. While Chin’s oldest son, Andrew Gigante, was not a made man, Chin had no objection to his enjoying the fruits of the family’s harbor ventures. A prime example of “no show” largesse, Andrew landed executive jobs with two METRO companies, paying him $340,000 a year in combined salaries, and he was a stockholder in another container-repair company in New Jersey and a shipping company in Miami. Inside the Genovese family, savvy capos and soldiers were aware that Chin was opposed to his sons formally embracing a life in Cosa Nostra, but they recognized another aspect of the father-son relationship: Andrew was Chin’s surrogate, guarding the regime’s valuable interests in Port Newark and Elizabeth.

As the 1980s ended, the FBI and the Justice Department’s best-informed Mafia experts had to admit they had been duped by Gigante’s erratic behavior into designating the wrong man as the Genovese boss. “The Genovese were different from other families, who had clear lines of reporting,” FBI squad supervisor Donald Richards discovered, adding that Chin’s maneuvers to keep the FBI off balance had worked. “Based on surveillance and informers we thought Salerno was the boss. It turned out that Chin was more powerful than we originally suspected.”

Michael Chertoff, the lead prosecutor who obtained the Commission case convictions which listed Fat Tony as a godfather, cited trial evidence that Salerno went to Commission meetings and “was treated and respected like a
boss.” Perhaps, Chertoff conceded, Gigante and Salerno should have been viewed as coequals with “Salerno, the chairman of the board, and Chin, the CEO.”

The FBI’s organized-crime supervisor in New York, Jim Kossler, had no regrets about the fairness of Salerno’s conviction and branding him the family’s top chief. “Even if he was a front, to all intents and purposes under the law he was the boss, making decisions, settling disputes, going to all the Commission meetings. You can’t take away the fact that Fat Tony was acting as boss of the family.”

Fish Cafaro’s defection in 1986 and later testimony cleared the smoke screen covering the family’s hierarchy and finally exposed Gigante’s omnipotent position. After flipping, Cafaro wore a wire for a year, but he was unable to get close to Chin, let alone talk with him. Cafaro’s undercover work produced one mid-level narcotics-trafficking case for prosecutors. Overall, he did not severely damage the family or obtain what the FBI wanted most of all: strong evidence to implicate Gigante in a crime. Unlike other borgata leaders, the resourceful Chin Gigante could not be trapped through bugs or telephone taps. Outside his select inner circle, no one was allowed to venture near him to gain his ear or his trust. And, he seemed to possess a dedicated following of soldiers and associates who would never betray him.

John Pritchard, the FBI’s Genovese Squad supervisor, who went on to hold high city and state law-enforcement posts, tipped his hat to Gigante’s evasive abilities. “Without a doubt, he was the smartest, most scheming Mafia figure to come down the pike in my time. There seemed to be no way to get him.”

“I Know Where Bodies
Are Buried”

L
ying comfortably in bed with his girlfriend snuggled beside him, Bobby Farenga felt secure. He had a $20,000 stash from the sale a few days earlier of half a “K” of coke and good prospects for future drug scores as a middleman who was being supplied by a reliable importer. Dozing off, he heard a rustling at the front door of his Brooklyn apartment. “Open up—FBI—we have a warrant for your arrest, Bobby,” a harsh voice commanded. Before he could get his brain clicking or a foot onto the floor, the door sprang open and a small army of men, guns drawn, invaded his bedroom. Bobby—Barclay was his given name, but it was too pretentious-sounding in his line of work and he never used it-had been busted for the half-kilo sale. It was an FBI sting and he had fallen for it, selling the cocaine to an undercover agent posing as a buyer.

The raid that November night in 1987 was routine, one of scores made by an FBI-NYPD narcotics task force trying to contain the irreversible torrent of drugs into the city. All the raiders knew about Bobby Farenga was that he was a low-level scrounger in the narcotics universe, with no tight connection to major drug dealers or to organized crime. But his arrest was about to prove the validity of the adage voiced by the old Cosa Nostra prophets about the pitfalls of narcotics
trafficking: dealers, faced with long prison sentences, will squeal and endanger everyone, including the bosses.

Bobby Farenga had never even seen Vincent Chin Gigante, the Mafia enigma who had stymied the FBI. Yet his two-bit arrest would steer the FBI onto a serpentine road leading to the Genovese godfather.

The squad of eight agents and detectives that burst into Farenga’s nondescript bachelor apartment in Bay Ridge was spearheaded by Lewis Schiliro, the FBI supervisor of the joint narcotics task force. Schiliro went directly from law school into the bureau, and was admired by fellow agents as a “brainy guy,” who could grapple with the complicated nuances of criminal statutes and also devise tactics for the risky duties of disarming felons without anyone getting hurt. Most agents dreaded assignments to New York, but Schiliro had grown up in Long Island, understood the area’s ambiance, and had volunteered for New York’s two most dangerous units: narcotics and organized crime. His ability to unravel complex cases was quickly recognized, and within three years he was supervising an investigative squad, an impressive achievement for a relative newcomer in the starchy bureaucracy. (Before retiring, Schiliro went on to head the bureau’s New York office.)

Quiet and reserved on the outside, he chafed at paper-pushing administrative duties, and whenever possible, was out on the street, tailing suspects, questioning witnesses, and nabbing “mutts,” bad guys. Enjoying the detective work and the action that came with hunting mobsters and narcotics traffickers, Schiliro described his job as “like having the best seat at a Broadway show.” Slightly built, bespectacled, and sporting a droopy mustache, he hardly typified the canonized image of a hardened G-Man. But in the mid-1980s, he was the lead agent and supervisor of the squad that dismantled “the Pizza Connection,” a network of Sicilian heroin traffickers. At the time, it was the biggest drug-smuggling operation in the country run by the Sicilian Mafia.

Apprehending Bobby Farenga was a small part of a larger investigation involving a web of some twenty heroin and cocaine dealers. A stoolie, acting as an intermediary, ratted out Farenga, and introduced him to an undercover agent who made the $20,000 buy when Bobby happily sold him a half-kilogram, more than a pound of coke. Gaining sufficient evidence on Farenga through a wiretap, Schiliro decided to arrest him, and obtained a search warrant for his apartment. In Lew Schiliro’s book, Farenga was relatively insignificant—“not a big dealer compared to what else we were doing.” But there was always the
possibility that he might know something about higher participants in the drug game, and notes in his home might provide clues to other traffickers. The thirty-five-year-old Schiliro had refined narcotics raids to a fine art, eliminating the need for battering rams and ferocious gun battles. He preferred staging the arrests shortly after midnight, when the suspect was usually vulnerable, befogged by sleep, too confused to discard a drug cache, unlikely to resist, and prone to blurt out an incriminating remark.

At Farenga’s apartment, the raiders applied their usual break-in technique, issuing a loud official warning to open up as they wedged a specially designed tool, the Rabbit, between the door jamb and the lock. In five seconds the lock snapped open. Inside, the perplexed, fortyish Bobby Farenga, paunch protruding from his underwear, was handcuffed while his Miranda rights were read to him. Searching the one-bedroom apartment, a police detective spotted a loaded .25 caliber pistol resting on the night table next to Bobby’s female companion’s side of the bed. Schiliro ordered the woman arrested for possession of a gun. As she was being cuffed, Farenga’s mind began to clear, and he realized that the agent with the conspicuous mustache was in charge of the show. After hearing the charge against him, Farenga asked to speak alone with Schiliro in another room. His first question was how much time he was facing for a half-“K” conviction. “Twenty to twenty-five,” Schiliro informed him. Federal drug laws were tough, even for first offenders.

“Let her go,” Farenga whispered. “Cut her a break. I can give you some pretty good stuff. I know where bodies are buried.” Using a profanity or two, Schiliro cautioned Farenga that his tips would have to be valuable and accurate if he wanted to help himself and his girlfriend. “Don’t waste our time, otherwise you’ll be in bigger trouble.”

Farenga said he could lead the raiders that very night to a building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where two bodies were hidden. Farenga then startled Schiliro with another assertion: they were Mob hits. “If you let her go, I’ll take you there right now.” Wasting no time, Schiliro hurried Farenga into his pants, and Bobby and his captors completed the ten-mile drive to the other end of the borough in about twenty minutes.

At a one-story brick warehouse in a grimy industrial section on Scott Avenue, Farenga stopped on a ramp in front of a loading dock. “Here’s where you’ll find Shorty, his feet are pointing to the warehouse,” Farenga said confidently. Using two sledge hammers stored in their car trunks, agents and detectives made little headway hacking at the concrete surface. They needed help.
By 3:00
A.M
., the police department’s Emergency Services Unit, a division used for rescue and hostage missions, was at the scene with huge generator-powered lights, drilling with jackhammers and using a backhoe to carve out a section of the ramp. Two or three feet below the surface, the diggers unearthed bones—but they were from a chicken, not a human. The discovery cheered Farenga. “When we buried him, we had a takeout order of fried chicken and someone must have tossed bones into the grave,” Bobby reassured Schiliro. “It’s the right spot.” The wiseguys obviously had worked up an appetite digging the grave.

Another foot of digging turned up the body of Tommy “Shorty” Spero, a Colombo mafioso, wrapped in a sleeping bag. Then a second corpse was found inside a plastic sheath. It was the remains of Richard Scarcella, a Genovese associate. The second corpse was precisely where Farenga said it would be: beneath a urinal in the warehouse. “Every time we took a piss, we said it was on Richie,” Farenga blithely told Schiliro.

Despite the mess he was in, Farengo grew more relaxed, almost jovial as the night wore on and his information about concealed bodies was proven accurate. Summoned in the middle of the night by the local police precinct, the owner of the warehouse arrived with his lawyer, an attractive woman in a red evening dress and high-heeled shoes. Maneuvering around the ogling policemen, the lawyer stumbled and was righted by Farenga. “Thank you, you’re a real gentlemen,” she said. “No, lady, I’m a criminal,” he cracked. The warehouse owner was not amused. He had recently acquired the property, and now FBI agents and detectives were questioning him about two corpses. The questions were routine—he had no reason to worry. Farenga had already filled in Schiliro about the building’s former owner, who was deeply implicated in both homicides.

With two bodies exhumed, Schiliro eagerly listened to Farenga’s sketchy accounts of the murders as they sat in a car outside the warehouse. Farenga had dredged up two previously unknown Mafia hits carried out by the same team of killers working for the Genovese family. He also opened the door to a separate, more intriguing revelation. He had peripheral knowledge of an ongoing multimillion-dollar fraud and bid-rigging racket conducted by four Cosa Nostra families. Through the arrest of a minor narcotics hustler, the FBI had bumped into two entwined cases. Even though Bobby Farenga’s ties to the Genovese family were remote, Schiliro knew his prisoner was more valuable to an organized-crime squad than to his narcotics task force. The Lucchese Squad had picked up signals about a new multifamily construction conspiracy, and Schiliro alerted the agent working the case, Richard Rudolph. Immediately,
Rudolph and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, Charles Rose and Gregory O’-Connell, began the process of debriefing Bobby Farenga. (Rose and O’Connor were the same prosecutors involved in Gaspipe Casso’s case.)